The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman (Penguin 2020)

I waited for so long for this book to become available in some format at my public library that I finally broke down and purchased it (gasp!). It was worth it. (I got a copy for my sister, too.) We are not birdwatchers in the sense of traveling to faraway places to spot exotic species to add to our Life List; nor can we tell one sparrow, or one warbler, from another. But we love to watch birds come to the feeders in our yards, and we worry to read of plummeting populations and new outbreaks of bird flu.

We humans are so arrogant. We arbitrarily decide that human ways of being in the world are the most advanced, and we like to measure how close or far every other animal on the planet comes to duplicating what we can do (talk, compose music, make art, make stuff grow where we want it and not where we don’t–with spotty success–build stuff, etc.). Disdainfully, we refer to people we deem unintelligent as “birdbrains.” Ha! Little do we know. In this book, Jennifer Ackerman details just how smart birds are, in all kinds of ways. She traveled the world to write this book, but her most surprising examples in the various categories of her subtitle might be the birds of Australia (where birdsong originated before spreading around the world). She notes how European and American ornithologists had little experience with the birds of the southern hemisphere, with the result that many long-held beliefs about birds in general have now been proven wrong. One example is the belief that only male birds sing (talk about arrogant!). Another is the dismissal of brood parasitism (laying one’s eggs in the nests of other species of birds) as rare. It is not. (And the host birds have their ways of fighting back.)

All in all, a terrific book that opened my eyes to a host of fascinating facts about birds.